#balaji — Public Fediverse posts

The “California Billionaire Tax Act”,
often referred to simply as the #billionaire #tax,
is a proposalthat would require any California resident worth more than $1bn to pay a
one-off, 5% tax on their assets to help cover education, food assistance and healthcare programs in the state.

It’s sponsored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West,
and if it receives enough signatures from California voters, it will go to the ballot in November.

When the proposal was put forward at the end of last year,
many among tech’s billionaire elite threw a #tantrum.

Some opened offices or bought mansions in Florida or Texas,
vowing to leave California for good.
The fleeing rich included Palantir co-founder Peter #Thiel,
whose current net worth is $25bn;
Google co-founders Larry #Page and Sergey #Brin,
worth around $255bn and $240bn respectively;
and Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David #Sacks,
whose net worth is not publicly known.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta CEO
Mark #Zuckerberg,
worth $229bn, has also bought a property in south Florida valued between $150 and $200m.

Thiel has additionally led the charge in donating to a lobbying group, the "California Business Roundtable",
which has pledged to fight the wealth tax.

The Palantir co-founder handed over $3m to the political action committee in late December.
Other major donors include realtors, entrepreneurs and private equity firms.
James #Siminoff, who founded the camera-embedded Ring doorbell company, also donated $100,000, according to public records.

“The most powerful money in politics is to be on the no-side of a ballot measure,” said #McCuan.
“You can even pre-empt something getting to the ballot, like a billionaire’s tax,
by explaining to everyone out there that this is a bad idea for economic growth.”

Tech investors and venture capitalists have been extremely vocal in their opposition to the tax,
saying that the state will lose revenue as billionaires flee and it will hurt the state’s ability to be economically competitive.

Just this week, Chamath #Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and current venture capital investor, wrote
“the loss of this tax revenue was totally avoidable but is now forever”.
#Balaji #Srinivasan, an investor and former chief technology officer of Coinbase, wrote,
“the most successful tech founders of all time have now exited the failed state of California”.

Adding on, Paul #Graham, the co-founder of seed capital firm Y Combinator, wrote:
“It’s important that people like Zuck and Larry Page are willing to move in response to the proposed wealth tax.
It shows politicians what will happen if they try things like this.”

Joining the billionaires, #Newsom has pledged to fight the tax, saying it will “drive a race to the bottom” and stifle innovation as the ultra-wealthy leave.
“This will be defeated – there’s no question in my mind,” Newsom told the New York Times in January.
“I’ll do what I have to do to protect the state.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/15/california-billionaires-state-elections

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to #Balaji #Srinivasan.

Before you do, steel yourself for what’s to come:
A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot’s ravings,
but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz,
in a blurb for Balaji’s 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country.

The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and
establish new sovereign territories.

I mentioned Balaji’s ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California
—a proposed tech colony called California Forever
—and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco’s government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name,
has a solid Valley pedigree:
He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University,
founded multiple startups,
became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz
and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase.

He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy.

In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he
“told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times.

Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline,
but his prophecies sometimes fall short.

Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless.
Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference.

#Garry #Tan
—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco
—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement.

Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting
“die slow motherfuckers”
at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics

But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said,
after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith
(founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore).

Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe
clad in gray t-shirts.

“And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos …
Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.”

Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city.

In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay?
All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan.

“What does that mean? That’s, as I said, banquets.
That means every policeman’s son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

#NetworkState #grayshirts
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat